An interactive photo essay for tablet produced by the National Film Board of Canada. This non-game project uses a combination of Starling and traditional Flash DisplayList. Dealing with large scrolling bitmaps and memory issues was a challenge, but thanks to the Starling team and everyone on this forum, we were able to get it done.

Combo of Starling/DisplayList is used on the app versions (iOS and Android). The web version uses Standard DisplayList only (to maximize audience reach). App performance is actually smoother than the web version.

The book shows you the internals of ANEs and how to make your own step-by-step with plenty of screenshots, illustrated tutorials and accompanying code. It also saves you time by showing you how to debug your native code.

The new edition, apart from an to iOS 8 and 64-bit AIR 17, comes with:

additional chapters on how to use third party frameworks;

ways of diagnosing build and packaging problems in Xcode 6;

whole new add-on book, which gives you a library for converting most AIR types into native data and back, like dealing with JSON, byte arrays, handling image and pixel data and much more.

Adobe has updated the Flash runtimes roadmap document. There are quite a few major things planned for upcoming releases as well as updates to what is new over the past year or so. The focus and drive remains the same as stated in the document.

Effects New in Unity 3.5, the highly optimized Shuriken particle system provides artists and programmers with complete control over particle-based visual effects. Shuriken is a curve and gradient-based modular editor, with hierarchies and sequencing capabilities that allow for many particle systems to stay synchronized.

Pathfinding and Obstacle AvoidanceImprovements to AI provide accurate pathfinding along complex pathways and natural movement through crowds. Game developers can bake navigation data in the editor and let Unity’s high-performance path-finding and crowd simulation take over at runtime.

Lighting and RenderingDevelopers can create jaw-dropping visuals with linear space (gamma correct) lighting and HDR rendering, and render them faster than before with Unity 3.5’s brand new multi-threaded renderer.Also new to Unity 3.5, light probes add life and realism to lightmapped scenes without the high cost of typical dynamic lights. The addition of light probes to Unity’s lighting system allows for baked lighting on characters and other dynamic objects.

New PlatformsUnity 3.5 supports Native Client as a new deployment platform. Native Client allows for near native speeds within the Chrome browser, without the need for installing the Unity Web Player. Unity 3.5 also ships with the preview release of the Flash deployment add-on, which has already been used by 50,000 developers.

Performance ImprovementsUnity 3.5 includes a completely re-written integration of Umbra’s occlusion culling system. The result is incredibly fast and works with terrains and dynamic obstacles such as doors. When combined with Unity’s new built-in level-of-detail support, it gives large-scale games the performance boost that they need.

Better Collaboration ToolsThe Asset Server license, Unity’s add-on for teams and collaboration, has been enhanced with new features that add greater performance and flexibility. The addition of Unity’s cache server dramatically speeds up collaboration on projects of all sizes, and a new developer API for third-party version control solutions, such as Subversion and Perforce, allows larger teams to work more efficiently. To reflect these changes, the product has been renamed the “Team License,” and made available as an add-on for all Unity users.

Additional ImprovementsThe update includes other improvements such as a new GPU profiler, a fully pluggable Social API to implement social gaming, and low-level audio buffer access to create music games, and directional lightmaps support to name but a few. For a complete list of additions and improvements, please visit http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new.

In this tutorial, we continue coding a hockey game using steering behaviors and finite state machines. In this part of the series, you will learn about the artificial intelligence required by game entities to coordinate an attack, which involves intercepting and carrying the puck to the opponent’s goal.